Category: Uncategorized

The Pro-Growth Tax Reform Hidden Inside a Fiscal Trainwreck

Posted on by Alex Terr

Six months after the One Big Beautiful Bill Act was signed into law, the country is already beginning to feel its consequences. Cuts to state-administered programs like Medicaid and SNAP have left massive holes in state budgets, forcing cuts to important programs. Meanwhile, the law’s tax cuts have kept deficits near record highs, leading to stubbornly high inflation. But tucked within this regressive and fiscally irresponsible tax law, there is one change that will benefit everyone. This provision, known as full expensing, will reduce our tax code’s penalty on business investment and lead to heightened economic growth.

In America, corporations are taxed based on their profits, meaning companies may deduct most business expenses from their taxable income every year.  Historically, however, the corporate tax code included one major exception. When companies invested in long-lived assets — such as vehicles, machinery, or computers — they were required to spread deductions over several years, rather than immediately deducting the full cost. Because a tax deduction received in the future is worth less in inflation-adjusted terms than one received today, this feature of the tax code effectively penalizes investment. In some cases, the penalty was extreme — businesses had to wait 39 years to fully deduct spending on some classes of investment, for example, reducing the real value of the deduction by over half.

To eliminate this bias against productivity-enhancing investment, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA) added new permanent full expensing provisions for most business investments, including research and development, and allows businesses to now immediately deduct the cost of many of their capital investments. It also temporarily extended full expensing to manufacturing structures like factories, though the provision is set to expire in 2031. In the long run, the bill’s permanent expensing provisions account roughly for just 5% of its projected cost. Yet their economic impact could be substantial: one analysis estimates that the changes could increase America’s economic output by more than $200 billion per year.

Unfortunately, however, much of full expensing’s benefits will be offset by the rest of the Republican tax bill’s provisions, which will severely damage our economy. The majority of the law’s tax cuts were spent on needless giveaways to wealthy Americans and special interest groups. These costly provisions left limited space for pro-growth reforms, so full expensing for most physical structures was excluded from the final law. Worst of all, Congress refused to pay for the law’s multitrillion-dollar price tag, which is projected to increase our national debt by 50% of GDP over the next 30 years. This debt burden will lead to higher inflation and lower economic growth, which will completely crowd out and overtake full expensing’s economic benefits.

Both policymakers and Americans might wonder why they should care about a tax penalty placed on profitable corporations; some progressive Democrats even oppose full expensing as a windfall for wealthy corporations. But this critique overlooks that business’s investment decisions don’t just impact shareholders — they affect the entire economy. When profitable firms reinvest earnings in new capital, they expand production, raise worker productivity, and support job creation. Over time, these gains all translate to higher living standards, increased wages, and more opportunities for American workers. By contrast, when the tax code discourages investment, firms are more likely to return profits to shareholders, a choice that does little to improve wages or economic opportunity for most Americans.

So how can lawmakers build on the success of full expensing, while also addressing the GOP tax bill’s economic harm? Comprehensive reforms to the corporate tax code, outlined in PPI’s 2024 budget blueprint, would allow it to raise more revenue from profitable companies without compromising economic growth. To start, Congress should expand pro-growth full expensing by permanently enabling it for physical structures, which would promote investments in housing, factories, and more.

It should also prioritize paying for not only new expensing provisions, but the mountain of spending it has already piled onto the national debt. Phasing out inefficient tax expenditures and loopholes such as the deduction for interest on corporate debt, the corporate state and local tax deduction, and more would be a promising start. To increase revenue even further, it should also raise the corporate tax rate from 21% to 25%, closer to the average rate in the developed world.

Lawmakers across the political spectrum should agree: America needs a corporate tax code that raises more revenue without sacrificing economic growth. Building on existing full-expensing provisions to encourage investment, while pursuing other tax reforms to offset the cost, would move our tax code decisively in that direction.

Jacoby for Washington Monthly: Putin’s Energy Blitzkrieg is Backfiring

Posted on by Alex Terr

“Wait ‘til it gets cold—really cold, Ukrainian cold,” a friend warned when I arrived in Kyiv in 2022. I didn’t know what he meant until this year—recent winters here, like almost everywhere, have been relatively mild. But 2026 is a throwback: it’s been snowing off and on for weeks, and temperatures, at their lowest in years, are hovering between 5 and 15 degrees Fahrenheit, and colder at night. Vladimir Putin is trying to weaponize the frigid weather with huge drone and missile strikes every few days, knocking out heat, water, and electricity in Kyiv and other cities. But if his goal is to freeze Ukrainians into submission, breaking their will, it isn’t working. If anything, they are more determined to resist.

Russia has been targeting Ukraine’s energy infrastructure since winter 2022. But this year is different—not just the weather, but also the scale and ferocity of Putin’s attacks. The bombardments escalated in December, and after nearly two months, they have come to seem a way of life. In Kyiv, there are air alerts virtually every night, punctuated every few days by a particularly savage attack. On January 9, Moscow launched 242 drones and 36 missiles, knocking out electricity across 70 percent of Ukraine’s capital and leaving some 6,000 apartment buildings without heat. The January 20 assault of 339 drones and 34 rockets included a Zircon hypersonic missile designed to destroy a warship. January 23 brought another 375 drones and 21 missiles, including another dreaded Zircon.

Ukrainian energy companies and attacking Russians play a macabre game of cat-and-mouse. After each assault, the companies scramble to repair the damage, often completing the task only to have the enemy strike again. On the morning of January 23, Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko announced that two-thirds of the damage from the previous bombardment had been repaired, leaving fewer than 2,000 buildings without heat. By the next morning, the tally again approached 6,000—roughly half the city’s housing stock, in many cases buildings that been without heat the week before.

Read more in Washington Monthly. 

The U.S. lost 20,000 scientific research jobs last year

Posted on by Max Sherrill

FACT: The U.S. lost 20,000 scientific research jobs last year.

THE NUMBERS: Real-dollar growth in R&D spending, 2020-2023* –

World known $400 billion
China $173 billion
United States   $93 billion
Western Europe**   $55 billion
Japan/Korea/Taiwan   $55 billion
All other known***   $24 billion

* PPP basis, constant 2020 dollars. OECD Research and Development Indicators database
** 27 EU members, the United Kingdom, Switzerland, Norway, and Iceland.
*** Australia, New Zealand, Israel, Turkey, Costa Rica, Chile, Colombia, Argentina, Russia, Singapore, South Africa. OECD’s database does not include ASEAN members other than Singapore, the Middle East other than Israel, Africa other than South Africa, and Latin America/Caribbean apart from the four above.

WHAT THEY MEAN: 

Headline from trade journal R&D World’s 2025 forecast:

“The question is no longer if China will surpass U.S. R&D spending, but what happens next. R&D World’s 2025 Global Funding Forecast projects China reaching effective parity with the U.S. this year ($1.05T versus $1.07T in PPP terms), with a full crossover expected by 2026.”

Background:

The post-COVID pandemic years were good ones for American science. Research investment stats take a few years to work out, but the National Science Foundation estimates that in 2023 Americans spent $923 billion on research and development — the world’s highest figure by about $100 billion, and up (without adjusting for inflation) from $730 billion in 2020. This was 3.45% of American GDP, tied with Japan for the world’s fifth-highest total and behind only Israel, Korea, Taiwan, and Sweden. Employment figures are more up-to-date, and show that from December 2020 to December 2024, America’s count of working scientists rose from 788,000 to 941,000 — over 150,000, raising the total by 20%. Altogether, Americans interested in mRNA vaccines, artificial intelligence, next-generation space telescopes, autonomous cars and planes, agricultural bee vectoring, etc., could feel proud of national accomplishment and excited about the future.

The U.S. isn’t alone, of course. The OECD tries to tally spending by country, and then to convert the yuan, euros, yen, won, pounds, etc., into dollar equivalents. Their count isn’t complete — it misses India, Brazil, and generally most large developing countries — but it probably gets most of the world’s science. They find R&D investment growing by about $400 billion from 2020 through 2023. Currency conversions and inflation adjustments mean you should read these figures more as approximations than precise comparisons, and likewise, “amount of money spent” isn’t identical to “actual scientific progress”. But they’re still pretty striking:

2020 2023 Real-dollar Growth
World known $2.4 trillion $2.8 trillion $400 billion
U.S. $730 billion $823 billion   $93 billion
China $608 billion $781 billion $173 billion
Western Europe $582 billion $637 billion   $55 billion
Japan/Korea/Taiwan $333 billion $388 billion   $55 billion
All other known $147 billion $171 billion   $24 billion

OECD, constant PPP-basis 2020 dollars.

In sum, despite the U.S.’s pretty big push, China by itself accounted for nearly half of all world R&D growth. In the abstract, competition among leading economies to put more money into research and invent more new things — whether for national prestige, for wealth and economic growth, or a better understanding of nature and broadly shared human progress — can be a net good. The startlingly fast growth in Chinese R&D, in this sense, might be a spur for Americans to try harder. But in fact, something quite different is happening.

American private-sector research remains strong. The government’s contribution doesn’t. The Trump administration’s first year brought large-scale firing of government scientists, a shrinking total science workforce, and attempts to “institutionalize” this for the future. This began with chaotic purges of science-agency talent and research-contract cancellations during the “Department of Government Efficiency” debacle — the U.S. Geological Survey and the National Air and Space Administration staff cut by a fifth, the Centers for Disease Control by a third, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration by a sixth; $2.6 billion in National Institutes of Health and $1.6 billion in National Science Foundation awards contracts canceled — and has been followed up with a more systematic attempt to disinvest from science.

Last September, the venerable American Association for the Advancement of Science reported that, altogether, the administration planned to cut federal R&D support from $197.5 billion in FY2025 to $154.0 billion in FY2026. Whether in percentages or total dollars, this would be the largest science budget cut ever — probably large enough all by itself, assuming Chinese growth has continued, to fulfil R&D World’s prediction and push the United States down into second place. Private-sector research can’t really compensate for this, as government programs weigh more toward basic research, which lacks immediate commercial return — space exploration in the 1960s, the invention of computer networks in the 1970s — but sometimes have very large long-term payoff. And in any case, the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ job tallies indicate that private-sector science may be following the government down. Its count of working scientists fell by 20,000 last year, the first net loss in a decade:

December 2025 921,000
December 2024 941,000
December 2023 934,000
December 2022 913,000
December 2021 860,000
December 2020 788,000
December 2015 672,000

OECD, constant PPP-basis 2020 dollars.

Different policies might bring some of them back. But looking further ahead, drastic slowdowns in legal immigration, presaged in this month’s decision to stop processing immigrant visas for 75 countries, would mean a structurally smaller American talent pool. The National Science Foundation reports that a quarter of American scientists, engineers, and lab techs were born abroad, including nearly 60% of the doctorate-level mathematicians, computer scientists, and engineers.

As they say, sometimes decline is a choice. But:

The Trump administration’s fecklessness doesn’t have to be “America’s choice.” At least in budgeting, the administration’s declining overall reputation appears to have emboldened Congress to reclaim its Constitutional role as the arbiter of spending. Without diving too deeply into arcane appropriations jargon — budget authority, outlays and obligation, FTEs, omnibus and minibus, etc. — Congress two weeks ago passed the “Commerce, Justice, and Science Appropriations” bill, which funds the National Science Foundation (NSF), National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA. This restored nearly all the science investment Mr. Trump’s clan wanted to cut, and bars agencies from moving money from science to non-science offices. AAAS’s current tally foresees a cut of 3.6%, as against the nearly 25% it foresaw last summer. A pretty big step, though the bills funding the two agencies that comprise about 77% of all of the federal government’s RD funding — the Department of Defense and the badly wounded Department of Health and Human Services — aren’t yet done. Good start. Lots more to fix.

FURTHER READING

PPI’s four principles for response to tariffs and economic isolationism:

  • Defend the Constitution and oppose rule by decree;
  • Connect tariff policy to growth, work, prices and family budgets, and living standards;
  • Stand by America’s neighbors and allies;
  • Offer a positive alternative.

The way it ought to be:

Vannevar Bush’s 1945 report to the Truman administration, The Endless Frontier, makes the classic case for public commitment to science.

PPI’s Paying for Progress (2024), from PPI Vice President for Policy Development Ben Ritz and Laura Duffy, offers a comprehensive budget vision proposing — among lots else — much larger R&D investment and much lower tariff rates.

The way it is: 

The American Association for the Advancement of Science reports (July 2025) on Trump
administration’s science budget cuts.

Ritz and PPI Policy Analyst Alex Kilander on R&D budgeting (March 2025).

PPI Director of Health Care Policy Alix Ware on the implications for medical research and cancer treatments. (May 2025)

And back to AAAS for a more recent, and more hopeful, dashboard tracking Congressional appropriations. (January 2026)

Country comparisons

The National Science Foundation on R&D spending by country.

OECD’s Main Science and Technology Indicators.

AAAS compares the U.S., China, and the world.

And R&D World predicts that China will be the world’s top researcher in 2026.

And American Talent:

NSF on the U.S. sci/tech workforce – places, demographics, diversity, education, etc.

The Institute for International Education counts international students. In the 2024/25 academic year, 217,000 international students were studying engineering in U.S. universities, 305,000 in math and computer science, and 96,000 in physical and life sciences.

Read the full email and sign up for the Trade Fact of the Week.

Manno for The 74: Dual Enrollment Is a School Choice Option People Don’t Talk About — but Should

Posted on by Alex Terr

National School Choice Week typically highlights the options available to families when selecting a school, including district, charter, private and homeschool. But there’s another form of choice that rarely gets the spotlight.

It’s a choice about what you study, who teaches it and how fast you can move from high school to a credential and a career. That hidden-in-plain-sight choice is dual enrollment — high school students taking college courses for credit.

National School Choice Week is an opportunity to point out that dual enrollment is one of the largest and fastest-growing forms of public school choice in America. It’s a school choice growth story that no one’s talking about.

The National Student Clearinghouse Research Center recently reported a modest increase in college undergraduate enrollment in fall 2025 — about 1%, driven by a 3% increase in community college enrollment. Buried inside those headlines is a key driver of that community college growth.

Read more in The 74.

Ritz for Democracy: A Journal of Ideas: Wealth Taxes Are a Dangerous Distraction

Posted on by Alex Terr

In a written debate for Democracy, a Journal of Ideas, PPI’s Ben Ritz debates the question: should billionaires exist? In his responses, Ritz argues for a pragmatic approach to reduce inequality in America, rather than a large wealth tax designed to tax billionaires out of existence.

Ritz acknowledges that inequality is a major problem in America, and that we need new laws to prevent wealthy Americans from wielding unfair political influence. But he also stresses that billionaires are not responsible for every problem in American society, as his opponents all but assert. By blaming billionaires for issues like climate change and housing affordability, activists distract from real solutions to those problems

Furthermore, implementing a wealth tax to combat inequality would have enormous unintended consequences. In countries where they have been tried, wealth taxes have been difficult to enforce, leading to astronomical rates of tax evasion. Furthermore, wealth taxes damage the economy by incentivizing wealthy Americans to spend down their fortunes, rather than investing in the American economy. These incentives would slow economic growth and reduce wages for working people across America

Instead of focusing on an unrealistic wealth tax, Ritz calls for real solutions to reduce inequality in America. He recommends that lawmakers raise the top tax rates for income and capital gains, close loopholes in the tax code, and implement a progressive inheritance tax to combat intergenerational wealth concentration. These pragmatic solutions would combat inequality, without destroying the economic system that made America one of the most prosperous countries in the world.

Read the full argument in Democracy.

Kahlenberg in The New York Times: Yale Offers Free Tuition to Families With Incomes Under $200,000

Posted on by Alex Terr

Richard Kahlenberg, director of the American Identity Project at the Progressive Policy Institute, said the effort was good not just for the country but also for Yale, because it will allow students from different walks of life to attend, increasing the range of viewpoints on campus as well as the range of backgrounds.

“Economic diversity can bring racial diversity in a way that’s perfectly legal,” he said. “So after the Supreme Court struck down the use of race, institutions like Yale had to find different ways to get racial diversity.”

Read more in The New York Times 

Trump’s ‘Board of Peace’ is a Corrupt Joke

Posted on by Max Sherrill

President Trump’s “Board of Peace,” formally launched at the annual confab of the world’s elite at Davos, amounts to little more than perhaps the most ambitious pay-to-play scheme in history. 

Originally a part of last October’s Gaza cease-fire plan, the Board of Peace has since evolved into a broader scheme that holds enormous potential for corruption. According to its charter, nations wanting a permanent seat on the body must give it “more than USD $1,000,000,000 in cash funds to the Board of Peace within the first year of the Charter’s entry into force.” Trump himself serves personally as chairman for life and holds more or less total authority over the board’s composition and activities — right now, it includes such luminaries as Secretary of State-slash-National Security Adviser Marco Rubio, the apparently omnicompetent special envoy Steve Witkoff, and presidential son-in-law Jared Kushner. What’s more, Trump will also be able to handpick his own successor.

Never mind that violence continues to plague Gaza, meaning the Board of Peace doesn’t have much real peace to keep. Even the most seemingly easy parts of the ceasefire plan — the return of Israeli hostages, living and dead — have taken longer than initially envisaged, with far more difficult steps like the disarmament of Hamas and the assembly of an International Stabilization Force for Gaza yet to get underway. Jared Kushner’s fantasy of gleaming, redeveloped luxury Gaza will likely remain just that — a fantasy. 

Beyond the rather obvious corruption risk that gives foreign potentates the opportunity to buy Trump’s favor, the Board of Peace is also a bid by Trump and his cronies to usurp or circumvent the functions of existing international bodies and institutions like the United Nations. Flawed as they may be in many respects, these institutions do possess widespread legitimacy: virtually every nation on Earth belongs to the UN. We don’t need to romanticize these institutions or pretend that they’re better and more effective than they really are — in far too many cases, they even wind up prolonging conflicts and issues they intend to resolve — to recognize they often have practical value as forums for discussions among nations and, in some cases, mechanisms for action on pressing international problems. 

As a pay-to-play scheme with its membership determined by Trump himself, the Board of Peace will lack even a patina of legitimacy — and it may find it impossible to achieve anything aside from its primary function of enriching Trump himself or its original purpose of supervising the Gaza ceasefire plan. 

Indeed, the board’s membership remains far too narrow to command anything resembling widespread and lasting legitimacy. Right now, the board consists of a handful of governments already politically aligned with Trump or seeking to curry his favor in one way or another: countries like Argentina and Hungary run by Trump allies Javier Milei and Viktor Orban, as well as Middle Eastern states like Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Turkey that combine ties to Trump with their own national interests in Gaza’s stability. All told, around thirty-five countries out of the fifty or so Trump invited to join the Board of Peace have said they’ll sign up, with only Vladimir Putin promising to pony up the $1 billion payment required for a permanent board seat — funds the Kremlin says will be drawn from Moscow’s frozen assets. If Trump were to accept Putin’s offer, he would effectively be comping the Kremlin for its membership.

It’s also telling that some of America’s closest and longest-standing allies have rejected Trump’s invitation to join his Board of Peace. France, Germany, and Italy have all signaled that they will not sign on, while Trump himself petulantly revoked Canada’s invitation after Prime Minister Mark Carney’s sober call at Davos to recognize that the so-called rules-based order no longer governs the affairs of nations — due in large measure to Trump’s bristling hostility toward America’s NATO allies and chronic threats to tariff America’s closest trading partners. This sort of mercurial behavior offers another in a long line of stark warnings to other nations: humor Trump and join the Board of Peace at your own peril.

As a result, it seems unlikely at the moment that the Board of Peace will succeed either as a mechanism to enrich Trump himself or as a substitute for the existing international bodies like the United Nations. It lacks the basic legitimacy that the UN, for all of its often severe flaws and failings, possesses by virtue of its near-universal membership. Only the most corrupt and undemocratic of nations will shell out the billion dollars demanded for the permanent opportunity, as the Washington Post columnist Max Boot put it, “to volunteer to be bossed around by Chairman Trump.”

For its part, Congress should refuse to appropriate or authorize any funding for the Board of Peace that goes beyond the role specified for it in Gaza under UN Security Council Resolution 2803. Indeed, Congress should hold Trump’s feet to the fire and require him and his Board to actually come up with a workable plan for Gaza lest the cease-fire, such as it is, unravels. The Trump administration, having demolished USAID and no doubt highlighting the UN’s shortcomings, will likely insist that American taxpayers foot part of the board’s bill. Outside of possible funding for Gaza, however, Congress should answer any request to do so with a firm and resolute no. 

Of course, this could all be much ado about very little if Trump fails to make any money from the Board of Peace over the next year. It will stagger on as a zombie institution through the remainder of Trump’s term, remembered as nothing more than a colossal exercise in vanity and corruption.

Juul for InsideSources: On Greenland, Trump Madness Runs Amok

Posted on by Alyssa Brown

There’s only one way to describe President Trump’s fixation with seizing Greenland: madness.

It’s a preoccupation that’s untethered from reality and lacks any rational justification. Indeed, none of the shifting rationales offered by the Trump administration makes any sense — particularly the supposed national security grounds for annexation.

It’s impossible to say what the United States might gain from such a move because the country would not gain anything from it. The U.S. military already possesses extensive access to Greenland, thanks to the 1951 agreement between Washington and Copenhagen. The U.S. Space Force maintains a base at Pituffik in the territory’s far north that helps monitor for ballistic missile attacks.

Moreover, America is already committed to defending Greenland against aggression via Article V of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Per that provision — invoked only once in response to the September 11, 2001, terrorist attack on the United States — an armed attack on Greenland, an autonomous and self-governing territory under Danish sovereignty, would be considered an attack on the United States itself.

Continue reading.

Marshall for The Hill: Trump Appeases Putin While Invading US Cities

Posted on by Alex Terr

Ukrainians are freezing and dying in the dark this winter as Russian missiles and drones relentlessly pound their power plants and other civilian targets. You’d expect Americans, who fought for eight long years to win their independence from another colonial power, would side instinctively with Ukraine.

And they do. Most — now including a majority of Republicans — favor sending more U.S. military assistance to Kyiv. Yet President Trump seems less moved than peeved by Ukraine’s stubborn resistance to Russia’s savage war of conquest and refuses its defenders weapons they desperately need to even the odds.

It seems the president values his unrequited man-crush on Russian dictator Vladimir Putin more than the trivial matter of Ukrainians’ freedom. This week, Trump made a mockery of his own “Board of Peace” for Gaza by inviting the Kremlin warlord to join.

Perhaps to impress his bellicose pal, Trump has turned to war. He’s attacked Venezuela. He threatened to bomb Iran again if it doesn’t stop killing protesters. And in a fit of pique over not winning a Nobel Peace Prize, he vowed to seize Greenland by force before backing off in a bizarre speech to world leaders Wednesday in Davos.

Read more in The Hill.

POPA vs. ASAA: The Right Path Forward for Kids Online Safety

Posted on by Alex Terr

Congress is moving swiftly ahead on legislation that would require smartphone apps to verify the ages of their users in order to protect children’s safety online. But with full markups on several bills scheduled for the coming weeks, lawmakers face an important choice between competing approaches.

Among the leading bills, H.R. 6333, the bipartisan Parents Over Platforms Act (POPA) introduced by Reps. Jake Auchincloss (D-Mass.) and Erin Houchin (R-Ind.) stands in strong contrast to H.R. 3149, the App Store Accountability Act (ASAA) introduced by Rep. John James (R-Mich.). Though both bills aim to safeguard kids through requirements on app stores, POPA stands out as a more practical, privacy-forward, and parent-aligned approach. Here are four key policy areas where the two bills differ. 

Shared Responsibility

Checking an app users’ age is a complex task, and responsibility for it should fit with the actual roles of app developers and stores. While both bills enlist mobile app stores in the age assurance process, ASAA establishes onerous requirements that would require them to collect government IDs from all users — minors and adults alike — regardless of what kind of app they want to download.

While app stores may be well-positioned to use basic age information to limit the apps younger people can download, they have little control or knowledge of what happens once an app is installed. The ASAA would make the point of download the only major check on online safety, with app developers holding minimal responsibility for providing safer experiences after their product is loaded onto a child’s phone. This strategy could inadvertently lead to poorly applied restrictions with content minimally tailored to be age appropriate and little control of how apps are actually used.

By contrast, POPA proposes a shared responsibility across the ecosystem, requiring app stores to conduct age checks at the point of download and developers to do the same when consumers use certain parts of their apps. As PPI wrote last month, parents believe strongly that verification should go beyond a one-time check. 

Consent Fatigue

For parental consent to be meaningful, it must be sustainable: Too many requests lead users to accept terms without reading them, much the way most of us now automatically click through the ubiquitous cookie consent banners websites started displaying following enforcement of Europe’s GDPR. This phenomenon, known as consent fatigue, should be carefully considered in the design of an age verification framework.

POPA gives parents tools to manage kids’ access without becoming overly frequent or demanding. For example, parents are able to restrict access by category or age rating, rather than at every app download. Giving parents these tools means they still can still make meaningful decisions about their kids’ activity without being inundated by routine approvals that might cause them to tune out. 

Though designed with good intentions, ASAA’s approach is much more likely to overwhelm parents. The bill would require app stores to receive parental consent during each and every download request. Even if parents decide that their kids are ready to download some kinds of apps independently, ASAA does not provide a mechanism to let them do so. And with requirements to receive additional parental consent after “significant changes” are made to any app, requests are likely to be frequent.

Parental Control & Data Sharing

When handling sensitive personal information, privacy and choice should be foundational priorities. The age assurance process should strive to minimize data collection and sharing, obtaining only the information needed for age assurance and nothing beyond.  While POPA gives parents the agency to decide when and where their child’s age is shared, ASAA mandates broad sharing without consent. 

ASAA requires all new users to undergo age verification, and developers of all apps – even those without age restricted content — to receive information about all users’ ages by default. This approach violates the principle of data minimization and puts all users at risk. Even if a user wishes to download an app that does not include age-restricted content, like a notetaking app or their favorite coffee shop’s app, they will still be required to undergo the age verification process. Parents and other users have no choice over the collection and sharing of their information.

POPA takes a narrower approach, allowing users to declare their age and giving parents the ability to choose to share age information with developers. While the bill encourages app stores to use techniques like age estimation to provide age assurance, it does not require it. 

Legal Considerations

Crucially, the concerns over scope and applicability considered in this piece are not purely speculative. Last month, a federal judge temporarily blocked Texas’s state-level age verification law on the grounds that it was “exceedingly overbroad” and “unconstitutionally vague.” If Congress is serious about protecting children and giving parents choice, it should pursue a legally durable approach that can withstand the same first amendment challenges that the Texas law faced. POPA’s measured scope, with a defined set of covered applications and focus on parental consent and choice, appears up to this legal scrutiny. As markup approaches, lawmakers now have an opportunity to advance legally durable and practically designed age assurance legislation. Congress should choose POPA. 

Kahlenberg in The Wall Street Journal: American-Studies Journal Articles Biased Against U.S., Analysis Says

Posted on by Alex Terr

A report by a left-of-center think tank being released Thursday reviewed three years of articles in the discipline’s flagship journal and characterized the scholarship as distorted, one-sided and “unrelentingly negative.”

“The analysis by the nonprofit Progressive Policy Institute reviewed 96 papers in American Quarterly published from 2022 through 2024. The authors determined 80% were critical of America, 20% were neutral and none was positive. American Quarterly is the flagship journal of the American-studies field.

“American Quarterly essentially erases virtually anything positive about the American experience,” the report says. “Instead of providing a rich and varied collection of positive, critical, and mixed accounts of America’s history, literature, and culture, American Quarterly paints a one-sided and unrelentingly negative portrait.” […]

The Progressive Policy Institute, which launched the project, is a public-policy think tank founded by centrist Democrats in 1989. It houses the American Identity Project, which tries to help schools and colleges promote a common American identity.

Richard Kahlenberg, an education analyst who has advocated against racial and legacy preferences in college admissions, leads the project. David Brooks, an author and columnist, and William Galston, an opinion columnist at The Wall Street Journal, whose opinion pages operate independently from the news department, are members of the American Identity Project’s advisory group.

“There is nothing wrong with being critical of America; I’m critical of America,” said Kahlenberg, who co-wrote the report. “But the ultimate goal of American studies is to pursue the truth about America, the good and the bad.”

Read more in The Wall Street Journal. 

Kahlenberg and Lin for The Wall Street Journal: American Studies Can’t Stand Its Subject

Posted on by Alex Terr

The 250th anniversary of America’s founding provides an opportunity to reflect on—and fight over—the country’s extraordinary story. Unfortunately, many of the serious scholars who study America—its history, literature and culture—fail to provide a balanced and nuanced account of the country’s complex tale.

On the one hand, America’s is a story of greatness: The U.S. is the wealthiest and most powerful nation on the planet. Its founders created what is now the world’s longest-lasting liberal democratic constitution. The Declaration of Independence put forth revolutionary ideas about human freedom and equality that ushered in a new era for the world. At the same time, the American experience is complicated. Our history includes the mistreatment of Native Americans, slavery and Jim Crow, and high levels of economic inequality that persist to this day.

Yet we found only one part of this narrative presented in most of almost 100 articles we examined from over a three-year period in American Quarterly, the flagship journal of the American Studies Association. Published by Johns Hopkins University, it’s widely considered the country’s premier journal of American studies.

The journal’s scholarship paints a one-sided and unrelentingly negative portrait of the U.S. We found that 80% of articles published between 2022 and 2024 were critical of America, 20% were neutral, and none were positive. Of the 96 articles we examined, our research identified 77 as critical, focused on American racism, imperialism, classism, sexism, xenophobia, homophobia and transphobia. Some articles went to absurd lengths to identify sins. One essay posited that thermodynamics—the science dealing with the relationship between energy, heat, work and temperature—is “an abstract settler-capitalist theory that influenced the plunder of Indigenous lands and lives.”

We were generous in tagging articles as neutral. Virtually every one of these 19 articles raised at least one critique (racism, sexism and the like), but they also typically described the ways in which members of marginalized communities were able to resist. Implicit in the articles is the sense that there may be a kernel of something good in a society that enables individuals to rise above oppression.

Read more in The Wall Street Journal. 

New PPI Report Finds Premier Academic Journal Offers a Narrow, Ideological View of America

Posted on by Alex Terr

WASHINGTON — The Progressive Policy Institute (PPI) today released a new report warning that American Quarterly, the flagship journal of the American Studies Association, presents an overwhelmingly critical and unbalanced view of American society, failing to reflect the nation’s full historical and cultural complexity. As cultural and historical debates intensify, the report finds that a leading academic journal is shaping the understanding of America’s story through a consistently negative and ideologically narrow lens.

The report, titled “The Distortion of American Studies: How the Field’s Leading Journal Has Embraced a Worldview as Slanted as Donald Trump’s,” evaluates 96 articles published between 2022 and 2024. It finds that 80% of the journal’s content was critical of America, 20% neutral, and not a single article offered a positive portrayal of the American experience.

“In the same way Donald Trump whitewashes America’s flaws, this journal effectively erases its virtues,” said Richard D. Kahlenberg, Director of PPI’s American Identity Project and co-author of the report. “Academic inquiry should be honest and wide-ranging, not ideologically blinkered. When one of the field’s most influential publications excludes virtually any acknowledgment of American progress or ideals, it does a disservice to students, educators, and the country itself.”

Authored by Kahlenberg and PPI Policy Research Fellow Lief Lin, the report warns that this imbalance in scholarship risks undermining civic cohesion, fueling public mistrust in higher education, and distorting curricula across universities and K–12 classrooms. While rigorous critique is essential to understanding America’s past and present, the authors argue that academic institutions must also highlight the values, ideas, and movements that have driven American progress.

Key findings from the report include:

  • Of the 96 essays reviewed, 77 were coded as “critical,” 19 as “neutral,” and zero as “positive.”
  • The most common critiques involved racism, imperialism, and classism, while discussions of American innovation, democratic development, or cultural influence were notably absent.
  • Even “neutral” articles often described America as oppressive before highlighting individual resistance or critique.
  • The journal frequently used inaccessible jargon, limiting broader engagement and reinforcing ideological gatekeeping in the academy.
  • The worldview promoted by American Quarterly is already influencing curricula at elite institutions and seeping into K–12 instruction through works like the 1619 Project.

Rather than calling for government intervention, the report urges reform from within the academy. It highlights the importance of a balanced and pluralistic approach to scholarship, one that embraces honest debate, intellectual rigor, and a full accounting of America’s failures and triumphs.

“A fair and complete American studies curriculum should reflect the civil rights movement as much as slavery, democratic ideals as well as political failings, and cultural exports alongside cultural critiques,” said Kahlenberg. “That full picture matters, not just for intellectual integrity, but for sustaining the democratic project itself.”

Read and download the report here.

Founded in 1989, PPI is a catalyst for policy innovation and political reform based in Washington, D.C. Its mission is to create radically pragmatic ideas for moving America beyond ideological and partisan deadlock. Find an expert and learn more about PPI by visiting progressivepolicy.org. Follow us @ppi.

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Media Contact: Ian O’Keefe – iokeefe@ppionline.org

The Distortion of American Studies: How the Field’s Leading Journal Has Embraced a Worldview as Slanted as Donald Trump’s

Posted on by Alex Terr

INTRODUCTION

The American story is extraordinary. The United States is the wealthiest and most powerful nation on the planet and the number one destination of immigrants from across the world. Its founders created what is now the globe’s longest-lasting liberal democratic constitution. At the same time, the American experience contains numerous dark chapters: the conquest and decimation of Native American populations; the enslavement of Black people, followed by decades of Jim Crow; and the internment of Japanese Americans. America’s rates of gun violence and incarceration, and its level of economic inequality, are among the highest in the developed world today.

President Donald Trump has notoriously sought to erase the negative components of American history. The Washington Post found, for example, that since Trump’s inauguration, the National Park Service has “softened descriptions of some of the most shameful moments of the nation’s past. Some were edited to remove references to slavery. On other pages, statements on the historic struggle of Black Americans for their rights were cut or softened.” Trump’s one-sided approach should be, and has been, widely denounced. His critics are right to ask: How can he tell only half the story?

While Trump is a politician who often engages in demagoguery, one would expect serious scholars who study America — its history, literature, and culture — would provide a much more balanced and nuanced approach. To assess that hypothesis, we examined almost 100 articles over a three-year period in American Quarterly, the flagship journal of the American Studies Association. Published by Johns Hopkins University, American Quarterly is considered the country’s premier journal of American studies, the publication in which the nation’s top scholars vie to have their work appear. Disappointingly, we find that the scholarship in the journal, as a whole, engages in the same sort of distortion as Trump does, only in reverse. If Trump erases the negative chapters in American history and takes a boastful stand about America today under his leadership, American Quarterly essentially erases virtually anything positive about the American experience. Instead of providing a rich and varied collection of positive, critical, and mixed accounts of America’s history, literature, and culture, American Quarterly paints a one-sided and unrelentingly negative portrait.

In this report, we begin with background on the history and purpose of American studies and outline some ideas about the types of questions and observations a fair-minded account of American studies might entail. In the second section, we outline our methodology for coding articles in American Quarterly as positive, critical, or neutral. In the third section, we present our findings about the mix of stories found in the journal. We also outline the varying prevalence of different types of critiques of America; recount the critical key words that appear most frequently; and discuss the type of prose that is found in American Quarterly’s pages. In the fourth section, we outline areas for future research; and in the fifth section, we conclude with suggestions for internal reforms to fend off the threat of government interference. The paper also includes an appendix of abstracts of the articles we reviewed (where available) and representative quotations from those articles.

Read the full report.

Canter in Total Information AM: Missouri’s school scores have ‘not recovered post pandemic’ says researcher

Posted on by Alex Terr

Rachel Canter is Director of Education Policy for the Progressive Policy Institute; and Founding Executive Director of Mississippi First. She joins Megan Lynch ahead of the Fourth Annual Education Town Hall – 2025 Missouri MAP Results today at 11am at the Knight Center at Washington University. What did Mississippi do to turn their rates around? ‘We dramatically increased the rigor of our learning standards,’ says Canter, ‘we expect our students to learn more.’

Listen to the episode.

The U.S. has no claim to Greenland

Posted on by Max Sherrill

FACT: The U.S. has no claim to Greenland.

THE NUMBERS: Trump tariff threats last week –

10% tariffs on goods from Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, Norway, and the U.K., rising to 25% by summer.

WHAT THEY MEAN: 

Over the weekend, Mr. Trump threatened to impose tariffs of 10% on February 1, rising to 25% by summer, on goods from eight historic allies — Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland, France, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom — over their unwillingness to support his strange ambition to acquire Greenland. So far, the White House has published no actual decree or other document giving this threat any force, and — as with last October’s threat for a similar 10% tariff on Canadian goods, meant to retaliate for an Ontario government advertisement quoting the late President Reagan on tariffs — perhaps it will simply go away.

That autumn threat, however, has done lasting harm: after a year of Mr. Trump’s provocations, the Canadian government has felt forced to make auto-trade and other arrangements with China to diminish the effect of any U.S. tariff on Canadian goods. The harm done by last week’s threat against America’s European friends will likewise escalate over time until it is reversed.

With this in mind, three points: the U.S. has no legal, historic, or other claim to Greenland; the administration’s effort to make such a claim is corroding American security; and Congress should repeal any tariffs on these countries immediately, and then reform trade law more generally to halt tariff innovation by decree and restore Constitutionally appropriate policymaking. More –

1. Greenland: Greenland is an autonomous country, constitutionally one of three realms of the Danish monarchy, with an elected government that sets its own policies. It is a NATO ally, with a large U.S. military base and an open economy. The governments of both Greenland and Denmark worked closely with the U.S. for eight decades on Arctic security (and often have been advocates of larger Arctic defense commitments than U.S. administrations have been willing to make), resource mining, and any other actual policy concerns, and remain willing to do so. Both have also made clear that sovereignty is not negotiable: neither Danes nor Greenlanders are interested, any more than Americans would be interested in selling off chunks of U.S. land and people to other countries. There is no Greenland “issue.”

2. Security: U.S. military alliance with the world’s advanced democracies — Western Europe, Canada, Japan, Korea, Australia — has been the foundation of American national security and world peace since the Second World War. It needs to remain so. Denmark specifically, as PPI’s Ed Gresser observed last year, is a four-generation ally and good neighbor, which committed 21,000 soldiers to the U.S.’s call for help in Afghanistan and Iraq and lost 50. National Security Director Peter Juul noted last week that threats and abuse against allies and good neighbors — that is, adventures which put this foundation of security at risk — are madness, and adds some time-to-break-the-glass ideas on ways Congress can usefully respond.

3. Tariffs: Congress has Constitutional authority over “Taxes, Duties, Imposts, and Excises,” and needs to use it now. Mr. Trump has shown, repeatedly, over the past year, that he cannot responsibly manage any delegated tariff powers. Congress, and in particular Rep. Jason Smith and House Speaker Mike Johnson, need to remove his temptation to use them. This requires laws to (a) cancel any tariffs on Americans buying Danish or other European goods, and (b) require Congressional approval of any future tariffs imposed under trade laws including the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (“IEEPA”, the basis for most of last year’s tariff decrees, presumably meant by Congress to help address rather than try to create emergencies); the various “Sections” of trade law 232, 301, 122, and 338; and (c) likewise require Congressional approval for entering, or leaving, trade agreements with tariff components.

Such bills already exist. With leadership from Sens. Ron Wyden and Rand Paul last October, the Senate has already voted to terminate Mr. Trump’s IEEPA tariff decrees. The House bill introduced last spring by Trade Subcommittee Ranking Member Linda Sanchez and the other Ways and Means Committee Democrats,  HR 2888, would cancel all of Mr. Trump’s “emergency” and “national security” tariffs and require Congressional approval of any new ones. Now would be a good time for them.

Last point: As we — again — noted last year, the world is full of complex challenges, painful choices among lesser evils, and chronic problems with no obvious solution. The status of Greenland isn’t one of them. To the extent there is any problem, it is quite new and has an obvious and easy solution: the Trump administration should stop causing it.

FURTHER READING

PPI’s four principles for response to tariffs and economic isolationism:

  • Defend the Constitution and oppose rule by decree;
  • Connect tariff policy to growth, work, prices and family budgets, and living standards;
  • Stand by America’s neighbors and allies;
  • Offer a positive alternative.

PPI on Denmark and Greenland:

National Security Director Peter Juul on Mr. Trump’s possible motivations, the costs they are imposing, and Congressional options, January 2026.

New Ukraine Project Director Tamar Jacoby on the European reaction, January 2026.

And Gresser on Greenland and Denmark as good neighbors and four-generation allies, April 2025.

Greenland background:

The Danish government explains Greenland’s constitutional status.

The Greenland Foreign Ministry.

The Danish Embassy is also home to the Greenland Representation Office.

The European Union’s comment yesterday.

Primary source:

The National Archives transcript of the Constitution; see Article I, first line for “Taxes, Duties, Imposts, and Excises.”

Next steps:

Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) on the Senate vote to repeal the April 2 “global baseline” tariff decree, and Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) on the obvious absence of any Greenland emergency.

Rep. Linda Sanchez (D-Calif.) on ending tariff chaos.

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